Report: The #1 B2B Sales Strategy

Gaining a competitive advantage through thought leadership is the #1 most important strategy for selling B2B.

Content Marketing Is Complicated. For B2B sales, we simplify your path to being recognized as industry experts with the highest sales closing rates. As B2B founders, we know how to create content that positions your business as an authority, makes the case for your technology, confronts rational/emotional hurdles, and elevates your salespeople to trusted advisors—your competitive advantage in an ABM sales world. OUR PROMISE is to make your reputation a powerful and effective addition to your company’s core competencies.

Gaining a competitive advantage by demonstrating thought leadership expertise is the #1 most important strategy for selling B2B. In this article, we not only explore why this is true but what is the easiest way to create an ongoing thought leadership content marketing strategy that doesn’t require significant time and effort from senior leadership.

What Happens Before Connecting With Sales?

Research from Gartner shows that 83% of typical B2B purchasing decisions (from researching solutions to ranking options) happen before a buyer engages directly with a provider.
Gartner’s research also points out that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers.

Since the largest portion of B2B selling happens before any in-person sales contact, this means that your #1 sales strategy is the content that precedes traditional sales efforts.

96% of B2B buyers review thought leadership content before making a purchase.
Yet 71% of decision-makers say “half or less than half of the thought-leadership content they read or watch gives them any sort of valuable insights.”

The #1 B2B Sales Challenge

More than ever, B2B customers are demanding tailored knowledge, insights, and perspectives. Gallup finds that customers increasingly expect suppliers to possess the deepest and timeliest information on their most important business issues.

89% of B2B buyers stated that winning vendors “provided content that made it easier to show ROI and/or build a business case for the purchase.”

This is an opportunity for companies to level up their content and outpace the competition. Sellers intuitively know this, as 31% of reps’ time is spent searching for or creating content. Yet, no salesperson was ever hired for their expertise in content creation.

The challenge is that content marketing is hard. A Gartner analysis found that only 41% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy. As a result, companies take a haphazard approach to content development, operating in fits and starts while failing to reach their audience and optimize their outcomes.

The B2B Sales Opportunity

The top sales opportunity is to enact a content creation plan that not only impacts the buyers’ decisions at early stages but also equips sellers with the ability to meet buyers’ needs in the latter stages of the buying process.

79% of business buyers say it’s absolutely critical or very important that they interact with a salesperson who is a trusted advisor.

Overcoming the barriers to creating high quality thought leadership content is easier than you think.

After working for more than 15 years with B2B companies, we’ve seen how content has been continually under-represented because:

What most companies haven’t capitalized on is the opportunity to be the thought leaders that bring together perspectives from around the industry. Not all industry insights need to originate from your company. Your company can be a thought leadership resource.

This can be easily accomplished by interviewing leaders in the industry to get their opinions, perspectives, and predictions. Although this sounds like a daunting, never-ending task, there is a well-accepted, widely popular marketing strategy for it already in place — podcasting.

The #1 ABM Sales Strategy: Podcasting

Podcasts are now a top channel for a B2B buyer’s research, showcasing your thought leadership expertise that builds trust, confidence, and consideration in your brand prior to any one-to-one sales contact. In fact, Gartner placed podcasting in their recommendation for “The Top 5 Marketing Channels B2B Software Providers Should Focus On.”

Podcasts are currently one of the most consumed forms of media - Forbes

According to Forbes, “Podcasts are currently one of the most consumed forms of media, with a near-endless list of potential topics and niche subjects to cover. Any business leader can easily create a successful podcast to help grow their brand.”

A recent Content Preferences Survey Report explores how the content consumption and engagement practices of B2B buyers have evolved. “Among the most popular content formats for early-stage research were infographics (62%), blogs (58%), and podcasts (56%).”

According to the LinkedIn blog, “When asked how long they would typically spend, 29% of buyers responded that the question was irrelevant – that’s because they listen to podcasts in their entirety no matter how long they are. Over half of buyers are listening to podcasts for 20 minutes or more at a time. There’s another reason for buyers self-selecting podcasts as the format they want to engage with: the best podcasts involve conversations. That means more than one person, appearances by subject matter experts, alternative perspectives – and not one, overly-controlled brand message.”

Podcasts keep you and your company in tune with your personas, industry leaders, visionaries, clients, prospects, etc., on an evergreen basis with one-to-one conversations—and the content has so many uses and applications, from social posts to testimonials, quotes, one-sheets, case studies, eBooks, articles, newsletters, battle cards, sales email sequences and more.

An additional benefit of Podcasts is that they not only provide audio content but can also provide video with a simple recording from a Zoom interview. From another recent report:

95% of B2B buyers say video plays an important role in deciding to move forward with a purchase.
70% say video beats research reports, webinars, infographics, books, and white papers in creating awareness of business challenges.
93% of B2B buyers say video is important in building trust in a brand.

B2B Podcasts offer many benefits simply not found in other forms of content

Gathering industry leaders’ points of view as guest contributors
Inviting your top prospects into an extended conversation as a podcast guests
Establishing another “owned” media channel.
Creating an evergreen and robust stream of content for research-hungry B2B buyers
Reaching niche audiences that are less catered to, as podcasts don’t need a big audience to be a success
Repurposing content like blog posts, white papers, and more
Feeding a continual search engine optimization (SEO) strategy with a high volume of content
Expands exposure opportunities from guests as influencers
Laying the groundwork for press credentials to attend high-profile conferences and events that align with your niche

There is no better ongoing source for staying in touch with your audience and producing high quality content on a regular basis.

Conclusion

Podcasts can’t be overlooked based on their ability to overcome challenges to create ongoing, high-quality content that your buyers NEED and your sellers MUST HAVE to successfully compete for and close sales.

A podcasting strategy can also be enabled by trusted third-party partners that schedule, conduct, repurpose, and promote the resulting content — as well as create much-needed sales enablement materials.

To learn more about the content marketing and podcasting solutions from ContentStrategies, please CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies. Follow Steve on LinkedIn.